


cat toy

by maketea



Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: F/M, Fluff, Growing Up, Implied Sexual Content, Tooth-Rotting Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-24
Updated: 2019-11-24
Packaged: 2021-02-26 04:14:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,014
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21547420
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maketea/pseuds/maketea
Summary: when adrien is two, he steals marinette's cat toy.
Relationships: Adrien Agreste | Chat Noir/Marinette Dupain-Cheng | Ladybug
Comments: 84
Kudos: 649





	cat toy

Adrien is two, and peers around his mother’s pleated skirt. The lady in the doorway is not Madame Fournière, but her grey eyes, soft face, and chin-length hair are close enough. Still, something is off. For one, Madame Fournière is always in his kitchen, always wearing her chef’s hat with an apron that smells rather similar to this lady. For two, this lady hasn’t offered him cookie dough, yet.

He clings to the skirt and his mother’s hand while they walk in together, and Not-Madame-Fournière leads them into a room with racks of bread and cupcakes and macarons behind shiny glass. Adrien almost lets go of the skirt to press his face against it, but his mother hoists him onto his shoulder last minute, and suddenly, he’s in a stairwell and going up. 

Not-Madame-Fournière and his mother smile at each other, exchange a few niceties, then Adrien is set down, and his mother’s hand is replaced with Not-Madame-Fournière’s smaller, warmer one, which Adrien clasps to take the edge off the rainwater on his palms.

“Be good, sweetheart,” his mother says behind him, but he stays looking up at Not-Madame-Fournière. “I’ll be back soon, okay?”

She kisses his curls, says goodbye to Not-Madame-Fournière, and heads back down the stairs.

He squints up at the lady who holds his hand.

She smiles back. “I’m Sabine. What’s your name?”

Adrien keeps looking at her.

Sabine chuckles, and this time, Adrien smiles. His mother does that, sometimes. Especially when he whines for her to sit him on the piano while she plays, or when he tugs on her sleeve until she gives him a hug.

It’s nice. Warm. Sabine is warm.

As is his raincoat now that they’re indoors. He fidgets, and pulls at the wet collar.

Sabine opens the big door in front of them with one hand, ushers him in, then crouches at his feet. While she unzips his raincoat, she points to the middle of the room.

On the carpet is a little girl.

She sits with her legs outstretched and a red dummy in her mouth, and looks up at him with round blue eyes. Her hair is the same as Sabine’s, only it’s around her shoulders, and her fringe covers her eyebrows. 

His eyes go to the soft cat toy in her lap.

Adrien is certain it’s the exact same one his father said he couldn’t have. It must have been. He still remembered its glassy eyes watching him as he walked away, while the store lights bounced off its dark fur and its proud, leonine stance on the shelf.

Sabine helps him wiggle his arms out of the raincoat. “That’s Marinette,” she says, and, taking Adrien’s hand, leads him to her — and the soft cat toy in her lap. “Say hi, Marinette.”

Marinette sucks on her dummy, and, saying nothing, watches him. She watches him just like the cat toy did, like the cat toy  _ does _ , the two sitting together and staring at him with their bright blue eyes. 

Sabine straightens, and smiles. “Well, I’d better get back to the bakery. You both have fun.” She turns, and leaves with Adrien’s yellow raincoat slung over her arm.

The soft cat toy leans against Marinette’s hand while she smooths down its whiskers and black fur. He leans into her face, and searches for her big eyes, wanting to see if they’re the same as the cat toy in her lap.

“Hi,” he says loudly.

She scrunches up her face, and turns away, suckling on her dummy indignantly.

The cat toy, head tucked into the crook of her elbow, still watches him.

Adrien crawls up to her, and, with a determined swoop, snatches it away from her. He embraces the cat toy triumphantly, stroking its fur and its whiskers and marvelling at its glassy eyes. When Marinette snatches for it, he’s the one to twist away, and when she fails again, she falls back onto the carpet.

Her mouth drops open. The red dummy falls onto her pinafore.

Marinette begins to wail.

The cat toy is only in his hands for a second before a man bursts through the living room door. He’s massive, almost larger than the threshold, and keeps the door open with his sheer enormity.

“What happened?” he cries.

Still wailing, Marinette points at the cat toy in Adrien’s lap. For the first time since arriving, the man acknowledges him, as if he only realised he was there after she drew attention to him.

The man isn’t angry, but he sighs.

“You must be Adrien,” he says.

◦◦,`°.✽✦✽.◦.✽✦✽.°`,◦◦

Marinette is three, and she won’t marry Adrien.

“What’s wrong with Adrien, sweetie?” her dad asks. He peers at her over the viewfinder on a clunky camcorder, which she gave up waiting for him to put down.

“He’s ugly and takes my toys,” Marinette says simply. “I won’t marry him.”

Behind her, Adrien stomps the carpet. “Why not?” he bawls.

She turns only slightly, just about acknowledging he’s there. “Because you’re ugly and take my toys.

“Now, Marinette, what did we say about calling names—”

“Fine!” Adrien interrupts. His face crumples, and Marinette braces herself. He’s such a crybaby. She once pushed him off her couch and he started to cry immediately — it wasn’t even that  _ bad _ . “If you don’t marry me, I won’t play with you.”

“I don’t wanna play with you.”

He makes a high-pitched whine, expression scrunched up as if he tasted something sour, and drops himself onto the floor. “Fine!” Adrien sniffles, fat tears rolling down his cheeks, and snatches up his plastic truck.

She turns back to her father and his camcorder. As her mother often does, Marinette puffs out a breath, and rolls her eyes. “See?”

◦◦,`°.✽✦✽.◦.✽✦✽.°`,◦◦

Adrien is four, and hasn’t seen blood before.

There’s not much scope to see it, for him. Back at home, he either babbles to his mother, or quietly practices phonics beside his father. Nathalie chides him for running along the corridors, down the stairs, from room-to-room whenever he has too much expendable energy. He has learned that energy can easily be spent on rainy walks with his mother, when she lets him jump into every puddle he sees, so long as he has his wellingtons on. But rainy days don’t come often, and with practice, the idea of sprinting full-speed across a marbled mansion floor becomes less and less appealing.

Marinette is a little different.

She clambers on top of kitchen counters, dining chairs, the precarious edge of a sofa’s headrest, while Tom and Sabine just shake their heads at her antics and remind her lightly to be careful. She stretches onto her tiptoes for cabinets even her mum has to use a stepping stool for, and declares that the linens she’s covered in that drag around her ankles is her superhero cape.

So when Marinette falls off a stack of books and slams her arm against the kitchen floor, it’s the first time Adrien sees blood.

She twists her elbow around to look, face already flushed, and as soon as the first trickle of red drips down the back of her forearm, she tips her head back and cries.

Huge footsteps thunder up the stairs, and Tom rushes in to Marinette’s aid. He gathers her into his chest, strokes her hair, asks her what happened, what’s wrong, where does it hurt, in a frantic voice, before finding the toppled stack of books by the edge of the kitchen counter, which held a jar of cookies.

Throughout the scuffle, Adrien glances around for a flash of crimson. He wonders if, after Tom’s hug, Marinette’s arm stopped bleeding.

Tom pulls away. It hasn’t.

She must have split her arm open. That’s why there’s so much blood. Adrien decides that his best friend Marinette is about to die in front of him, and buries his fingers deeper into the soft cat toy in his hands — the same toy he stole from her two years before.

“Do I have to go to hospital?” she asks shakily, while Tom pulls down a roll of kitchen roll and box of plasters.

“No, sweetie.” Tom runs some tissue under the tap, and, like a magic trick, makes the blood disappear just by rubbing her skin with it. With the mess gone, the cut — though swollen — is much smaller than Adrien thought. Definitely not bad enough for Marinette’s arm to be split open. “You’ll be okay. Just be more careful next time.”

He sticks a pink plaster onto her elbow, kisses her forehead, and returns to the bakery.

Eyes red, Marinette rotates her arm and inspects the plaster. She pokes it, then her face crumples, and her eyes well up with a few more tears.

Adrien approaches her cautiously, pointedly skirting around the toppled books. “Does it hurt?”

She sniffles. “Yeah.”

“Can I touch it?”

She hesitates. “Yeah.”

Using the hand holding the cat toy, he pokes her plaster.

Marinette jerks away from him. “Ow!” More tears rise to her eyes.

“I’m sorry!” He looks around furtively, hoping Tom’s footsteps won’t make a reappearance on the staircase. “Did it hurt?”

She’s crying again, rubbing her tears. “Yeah.”

He stands aside while she cools down, too afraid to startle her in case she cries even harder.

Adrien fiddles with the cat toy. Then, he gathers its arms and legs in his hands, and places it into Marinette’s lap.

She blinks at him, then at the cat. Tentatively, she pets it.

“Do you want a hug?” he asks.

Marinette nods.

Adrien shuffles closer and wraps his arms around her. Just as his mother often does, Adrien bends down, and kisses Marinette’s salty cheek.

◦◦,`°.✽✦✽.◦.✽✦✽.°`,◦◦

Marinette is nine, and doesn’t see the problem in dressing herself in front of Adrien.

Until they turned five, bubble baths were a staple whenever he stayed over. She wasn’t too young to forget it — even now, when Marinette catches a whiff of baby shampoo, she remembers watching her mother rub it into Adrien’s hair until it foamed around his ears, and splashing him with water when his eyes were closed. There are pictures of them sitting together in nothing but nappies, other than that red pacifier that Marinette never let go of stuck in her mouth.

There’s nothing weird about it. They grew up seeing each other like that.

She figured it’d stay like that for the rest of their lives — there’s nothing glaringly strange to Marinette about changing juice-stained pinafores with Adrien sitting behind her, or letting him play video games on her computer while she puts her pyjamas on after a shower.

One afternoon, Marinette hears a knock on her hatch for the very first time.

She stops pulling on her clothes, standing still and confused in her polka-dotted vest. “Who is it?”

“Adrien.”

“Oh, come in.”

The hatch cracks open, then just as immediately, slams back shut.

Marinette stares at it. “Adrien?”

Subdued, and a little embarrassed, he says, “your mum said I shouldn’t come in while you’re changing.”

She puts down the shirt she took off and squats in front of the closed hatch. “Why?”

“Boys shouldn’t stay with girls when they’re changing,” he says. “It’s fine, Marinette. We can go to the park when you’re dressed.”

Marinette watches the hatch for a moment. Then, she stands up, and continues pulling on her clothes.

◦◦,`°.✽✦✽.◦.✽✦✽.°`,◦◦

Adrien is twelve, and his stomach goes funny whenever Marinette touches him.

Though that doesn’t happen often anymore, not since they got a little older. Remembering the time he showed Marinette around the Agreste mansion when they were four was a piece of cake, yet Adrien couldn’t for the life of him pinpoint when it became weird for them to cuddle under the same blanket while they watched movies.

Weirdly, it’s now — now, when they use separate blankets and sides of the couch — that Adrien craves her touch the most. 

“Why do you smell like that?” she asks after a while of standing beside him.

“It’s aftershave.”

She quirks an eyebrow, and leans in close. Close enough for him to know she’s wearing the vanilla perfume he bought for her birthday. Close enough for his eyes to drift to that quirked eyebrow, and realise she’s been grooming herself.

“Since when do you shave?” she asks.

“Since my mustache started growing.”

She watches him, expectant, waiting for the punchline that wouldn’t be coming. 

Then, she starts laughing.

Adrien flushes. “What? I  _ am _ growing a mustache!”

“Yeah, right. By that logic, I am too.” She runs her fingers along his upper lip. Adrien gulps. “There’s nothing there.”

“Because I shaved.”

“Unnecessarily.”

“Hey!” He pushes her hand away. “Father said I need to shave for my photoshoots.”

“Your father feels bad for your baby face and wants to make you feel like a man.”

“Harsh,” he huffs.

Marinette giggles, and walks ahead.

◦◦,`°.✽✦✽.◦.✽✦✽.°`,◦◦

Marinette is fourteen, and she’s never seen Adrien like this.

Sadness follows him like a thick smog, and no matter how he laughs at her jokes, how he smiles at her, how he promises he’s fine, it clings to him, unrelenting.

Careful wouldn’t be the right word for how he acts. Adrien is frightened.

She realises when she trips down a flight of stairs at school, and instead of laughing at her, he throws himself to his knees beside her and  _ scolds  _ her. 

“What were you thinking?” he demands. “Can’t you be more careful? What if something happened to you?”

Marinette blinks up at him. She says nothing. This must be one of his pranks, again, and she’s not falling for it this time.

But the crease in his brow doesn’t smooth out, and Adrien kisses his teeth. “Can you stand?”

She looks down at her outstretched legs, and nods dumbly.

Adrien helps her up, all the while eyeing her.

Then, he does something he rarely does.

He pulls her into a hug.

“I’m sorry. I got worried.” He holds her tighter.

It’s not a random occurrence. Something flips a switch in Adrien when Marinette gets hurt — it’s hard to miss, with how often she’s bumping and bruising and banging herself into things. It’s been like this since Mrs Agreste’s disappearance hit the headlines.

Actually, it wasn’t just headlines. It was magazines, internet forums, YouTube theory videos, and the gossip on the morning commute. Now, two months after she was gone, Marinette watches Adrien brave them all with a straight face, as if some kid behind a microphone wasn't speculating his  _ mother _ to have either been killed or killed herself.

He says he’s fine.

Marinette knows he can’t be.

But it isn’t her place to interfere with his grief, no matter how much she wants to. She’s waited outside their classroom after Madame Bustier asked Adrien to have a 'chat' with him at the beginning of lunch, she's seen their classmates approach him carefully, as if he were some wild animal, she's seen all the sympathetic looks, the special treatment, the pity that pushes him away from normal kids their age and into the group of  _ suffering _ .

Over her dead body will Marinette ever separate him from her like that. But she feels like she has to say  _ something _ , at least. She just doesn't know what.

_ "It's been two months since Emilie Agreste's reported disappearance, and—"  _

Marinette stumbles up to her desk and switches off her monitor. "I'm sorry."

He smiles, but it doesn't reach his eyes. "It's not a big deal. I'm used to it."

Marinette stares at her black screen, then takes her finger off the switch.

She bites her lip, and returns to the sewing machine. Adrien, on the floor, continues his homework. He pretends nothing happened — and it's almost as if that's true. The sewing machine whirs, the papers rustle — but Marinette's chest aches more than it did before.

He doesn't look up from his homework. Adrien sits, alone, on the carpet.

Marinette doesn't think. She takes her foot off the pedal, pushes back from her desk, and approaches Adrien's hunched over back. She flings her arms around him, and buries her face into his neck.

She can't look up. If she looks up, he'll see her crying.

"I'm sorry," she says, and they both know it isn't for the news report. "I'm sorry, Adrien, I'm so, so sorry."

What is it about holding him that makes tears spring up to her eyes? Marinette doesn't relent, but instead holds him tighter, presses her heartbeat against his back and her cheek to his shoulder. 

Adrien's breath trembles. Marinette doesn't believe it. She peers up at him, and finds his jaw wet with tears. 

"It hurts, Marinette," he whispers.

She touches his feverish cheek. "I wish I could make it better."

◦◦,`°.✽✦✽.◦.✽✦✽.°`,◦◦

Adrien is sixteen, and he's never seen Marinette like this.

He doublechecks the time to make sure it's past eight-thirty, and pushes open her hatch.

It's an honest mistake — perhaps on both sides, but mostly his. She must have slept in, and Adrien…

Well, Adrien should have knocked. He just didn't expect her to be changing out of her pyjamas at this time of morning.

Her dark hair is loose, out around her bare shoulder blades, and flicks aside when she whirls around with only a bunched up shirt pressed against her front.

He freezes.

Marinette screams. “Oh my God, Adrien, get out!”

“S-s-sorry!” 

He ducks back into the landing, slams the hatch shut behind him, and crumples against the wall.

Adrien clutches his chest.

This can’t be real.

_ This can’t be real, this can’t be real, this can’t be real. _

Part of him — a naive, stupid part of him — must have believed nine-year-old Marinette couldn’t have possibly grown so much. A seven year gap is almost nothing — Marinette is Marinette, and Adrien has seen her naked before, why is it such a big deal now?

He presses his hand to his forehead and sighs.

Because sixteen-year-old Marinette’s back is a smooth expanse of fair skin with a spine that runs down it like a river.

Because sixteen-year-old Marinette’s hair is dark and silky and falls tantalisingly off one naked shoulder when she turns around.

Because sixteen-year-old Marinette has grown out of vests, and into more  _ grown-up _ accessories — none of which she had been wearing when he walked in.

Adrien closes his eyes.

He won’t think about her flushed face.

He won’t think about her collarbones.

He won’t think about the slip of her navel under the bunched up shirt she so earnestly covered herself with, leading up, and up, and up—

The hatch opens, and Adrien jumps. 

Marinette clambers down. She’s in her T-Shirt, blazer, and pink jeans, hair tied into pigtails, face without a trace of embarrassment.

“Sorry about that,” she says. “I should’ve started getting ready earlier.”

It’s a little hard to hear her after she wets her lips — the blood won’t stop rushing in Adrien’s ears.

◦◦,`°.✽✦✽.◦.✽✦✽.°`,◦◦

Marinette is seventeen, and she understands the excitement around kissing.

Rose and Juleka drifting into class with pink lips and shy smiles. Nino’s chuckle after Alya pecks him goodbye. Even her mother’s happy little giggle after her father pulls her in after closing the bakery — it makes sense. It all makes sense.

It’s paralysing. It’s nerve wracking. It’s… oddly wet.

She finds she can’t move her hand from Adrien’s shoulder once they start kissing, and when she does, it stops midair. He takes it in his, and rubs his thumb over her knuckles.

“You’re not breathing,” he says on her mouth.

She exhales deeply through her nose.

“Can we keep going?” she asks.

Adrien leans back in.

Their noses bump a few times, and Marinette opens her eyes for half a second to maneuver herself closer. She grasps his hand tighter, and keeps the other balled in her lap while she leans into his lips.

The pace was fine, at first. But now, Adrien slows down, slows down  _ far too much _ , to the point where Marinette is planting kisses to his gradual lips in an effort to speed him up.

“You’re a terrible kisser,” she says, and pecks him a few more times.

“Thanks, Marinette.”

She giggles. “It’s fine. I’m not any better.”

Marinette feels his smile rather than sees it, and it’s enough for her to unball her hand and take a cupful of his cheek. She guides him just as she likes it, and with the way Adrien pushes against her, she knows he likes it, too.

◦◦,`°.✽✦✽.◦.✽✦✽.°`,◦◦

Adrien is eighteen, and he kisses the gooseflesh on Marinette’s belly. She shudders under his lips, and he flicks his eyes up to her.

“Are you okay?” he asks.

Blush high on her cheeks and eyes glazing over, Marinette nods. “It tickles a little.”

The corner of his lips curls up. Adrien lowers his head to run his mouth around her navel until she giggles.

“Still tickles, but…”

“But?” He nips at her skin. She gasps.

“Feels good, too.”

Adrien smiles, still against the gooseflesh on her belly, and kisses her somewhere lower.

◦◦,`°.✽✦✽.◦.✽✦✽.°`,◦◦

Marinette is nineteen, and her father tags her in an album on Facebook.

_ That can’t be good _ , she thinks, and taps the notification. 

The first thing she sees is a little dark-haired girl sitting in a bubble bath next to a blond-haired boy. She has a red dummy in her mouth, and he’s busy playing with a rubber duck, but they both look up at the camera curiously.

It’s her and Adrien.

She glances at him now, bent over her desk and poring over a Physics textbook. His headphones have been in for the past half an hour, and though she knows he’d love to see this even more than her, she decides it’s best not to disturb him.

Though that doesn’t mean she can’t have a look through the album herself.

There are five-hundred and twenty-two photos, and she knows her father still hasn't uploaded the bulk of them, yet. She glances at most of them, but stops at a thumbnail of herself — not much older than three — with Adrien standing behind her.

No, not sitting, rather…

Throwing a tantrum.

She grins, and presses play.

_ "What's wrong with Adrien, sweetie?"  _ her father says behind the camera.

Marinette in the video's brow is scrunched up, her eyes large — almost disproportionately large — and she folds her arms. " _ He’s ugly and takes my toys. I won’t marry him _ .”

Watching it back, she snorts. Her mother, whenever Adrien comes for dinner, often recounts his bad habit of snatching Marinette’s toys from her when they were little. It must have been bad, if three-year-old Marinette was set on not marrying him because of it.

_“Why not?”_ the little Adrien cries, and Marinette’s heart tugs at the toddler with rosy cheeks, pouty lip, and tears streaming down his face because she wouldn’t _marry_ _him._

_ “Because you’re ugly and take my toys.” _

Marinette puts a hand over her mouth and stifles her laughter. Time definitely took its toll on them. Sometimes, when Adrien brushes water droplets off his yellow raincoat, Marinette thinks of the time they were four, and she hid his little raincoat under the sofa after they argued for the sixth time that week. They were indefatigable — it was a wonder they didn’t kill each other before the age of five. Now, Marinette’s parents shake their heads and laugh over how difficult they were to look after as toddlers. Marinette never doubted them for a second.

“Marinette?”

She looks up. Adrien has taken off his headphones, and turned halfway in her desk chair. He had left his pen on a precarious perch at the edge of the table, and, with his free hands, holds something small and black up for her to see.

The soft cat toy.

It’s missing an eye, and its stitched mouth is half-gone as the black thread hangs limply below its nose. She found it while cleaning her room a few days ago, and left it sitting on her desk.

“You still have this?” he says, amused.

“Of course.” She smiles at him. “It’s why I fell in love with you.”

◦◦,`°.✽✦✽.◦.✽✦✽.°`,◦◦

Adrien is twenty five, and wants to marry Marinette.

This time, she does, too.

**Author's Note:**

> twitter: maketca  
> tumblr: rosekasa


End file.
